What 2018 Holds for Waves: A Look At Its Progress So Far and What’s Next

Launched by Alexander Ivanov, a Russian physicist, in 2016, Waves is a popular platform project, and it’s known for running its incubation program to assist projects with financial aid and general guidance. Several features work together to make Waves a rational choice for those who want a platform to launch their token. Among these is a cryptocurrency wallet that supports multiple coins, smart contracts, a decentralized exchange, and a highly customizable tool that lets users decide the specifics of their token.

WAVES has a good reputation in the community. It has successfully supported several projects and partnered with major corporations. It is also one of the busiest projects on GitHub, consistently making commitsand ranking in the top 10 projects.

Such traits should indicate that the team has made good progress over 2017 and the early months of 2018, and indeed they have. Beginning in early February, the team opened up communication via their blog, which gives us a firsthand account of how the project has been moving forward and where they expect it to go.

Here, we’ll take a look at their progress in 2018 so far and what’s next for the them as the year goes on.

What Has Waves Achieved in 2018 So Far?

In its quest to steadily widen access to ICOs, development has encompassed the encouragement of token launches, partnerships, DEX upgrades, a desktop client, smart contract support, and a voting and messaging system. The rest of 2018 offers an even more exciting list of upgrades, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The project’s specific goals for 2018 are as follows:

Non-Turing smart contracts

Hardware wallet and Shapeshift support

Mobile app updates

Decentralized voting

Simple messaging system

Not of all these goals have been hit, but the team has made several other strides, most notably in launches and partnerships.

A Series of Partnerships

As is the case with any blockchain project, traction is best gained when its ecosystem has a lively environment of multiple stakeholders. The early months of 2018 saw Waves build its ecosystem, nabbing several partnerships and inducting 3 new residents into its WAVES Lab Residents program. The tokens for the incubatees will become immediately available on the WAVES DEX upon its launch.

Placing a bet on founder Sasha Ivanov’s conviction that the gaming industry could make for an extremely lucrative application of the Waves platform, Waves has sealed a partnership with the mobile eSports platform, RewardMob. RMob will launch a token on the Waves platform to more effectively deliver rewards to players in tournaments.

Development Progress

First Phase of Smart Contracts Underway

Waves has split their smart contracts functionality into 2 phases: one that is non-Turing and one that is Turing-complete. The latter is far more technical, but the former will allow the majority of users to be able to design and launch their own smart contracts, which should satisfy most needs.

The precise difference between Turing-complete and non-Turing complete computation is beyond the scope of this article, but, speaking simply, Turing completeness allows a system to perform any complex logical calculation, given a sufficient amount of resources. With regards to the Waves project, Turing-complete smart contracts will provide developers with programming possibilities on a grand scale, whereas non-Turing smart contracts will cover the majority of useful but basic use cases.

The key difference with Waves’ Turing-complete smart contracts is that, unlike Ethereum, it will not use Gas-to-power computation. Waves does this through a feature called “smart accounts,” which uses an attached script to verify that all criteria are met for the execution of the contract. This precludes the need for Gas fees. Accounts perform no actions on their own; they simply read the blockchain and return predicate (true or false) values.

“Smart assets” is another feature that attaches a script to an asset whose operations are all checked by the script. This includes verifying proofs from a transaction, checking if escrow has approved it, and ensuring that the transaction isn’t still in its lock-in period.

Source: Waves blog

Speaking to us, the Waves team said:

Waves’ smart contracts will initially include account and token controls, providing functionality for implementing the most-needed scenarios like multi-signature wallets, atomic swaps, 2-factor authorization as well as more elaborate protections for coins.

Ilya Smagin, head of development for smart contracts, further explained:

We will also introduce a data transaction – a way to post oracle data to blockchain, which will be available from within our smart contracts code.

Source: Waves blog

Released in late April, the team is deploying the smart contracts functionality, keeping in mind that such a complex feature should be offered only once there is as little risk of failure as possible. This is the reason why Turing-complete contracts will arrive later this year; Waves wants to test operations with non-Turing complete contracts first.

Smart contracts will bring multisignature wallets, atomic swaps, dapps, and the freezing of tokens to the platform, which greatly expands the possibilities of what one can do on it. Furthermore, it will speed up a network that’s already fast.

Wavesnet-NG Implemented on Mainnet

In February, Waves applied an upgrade to their mainnet, which they claim has made the network the fastest blockchain platform in the world. This new mechanism, Wavesnet-NG, is very different from the mining process in Bitcoin. Miners are selected in advance and can add transactions to a block in close to real-time, unlike Bitcoin, where transactions are added retrospectively. Miners came to a consensus that this upgrade should indeed be implemented.

Messaging

Waves has the intention of offering serviceable messaging, with the possibility of it becoming an independent application upon review. This simple messaging protocol has not yet been created and integrated into the client, but it is a priority for the project. This protocol will allow users to communicate in the way that typical messaging apps permit, but with their data encrypted.

Desktop App Launch

Perhaps of moderate importance when compared to other tasks, but nonetheless worth mentioning, Waves released a standalone desktop app. The team is particularly pleased about the fact that the new interface for the client will make trading on the DEX a simpler and more intuitive process.

Things Look Good, So Far

Thus far, the Waves project has achieved the larger part of their declared objectives and are delivering increasingly forthright information about their intentions for the rest of the year. Chinese authorities, who have recently rated various blockchain projects across the globe, included Waves as one of the 28 projects that are worth watching out for.

The most telling aspects of the project’s progress is the steady implementation of the smart contracts agenda and the confident selection of industry-specific partners that Waves knows will benefit most from the platform. The latter is specifically worth talking about because Waves, like any other project, needs to get more people onboard. Positive responses and happenings from those already on Waves will snowball into further collaborations of this sort.

What’s Next for Waves?

So, with the groundwork well underway, what is Waves building in 2018 to extend their reach as a premier token platform?

Source: Waves blog

In addition to the missed objectives of Q1, the stated objectives for the rest of 2018 are as follows:

Atomic swaps

Voting (front-end)

Messaging

Lite-client

Turing-complete smart contracts

We’ve described messaging, and while lite-clients are certainly important, the three objectives here that will have investors eager are atomic swaps, voting, and Turing smart contracts.

Atomic Swaps

Atomic swaps will allow interaction with several different blockchains, making Waves an even more viable platform for launching ICOs, as well as a one-stop shop for making trades. This function is being worked on by several major projects and would allow one cryptocurrency to be traded for another with no involvement of a third party. We should receive this on Waves before the end of Q2 2018.

Voting

Decentralized voting mechanisms are integral in creating an equal system in which users can dictate how a network should operate. The exact way this voting will function is not clear yet, but if it’s on the agenda for Q2, given Waves openness, we should hear about it in a blog post soon.

Turing-Complete Smart Contracts

Once the first phase of the smart contracts has been reviewed and graded as satisfactory by the team, Waves will get the major upgrade of Turing-complete smart contracts. This is expected to arrive in Q4 and will cover all possible uses for smart contracts on the platform.

Waves founder Ivanov also detailed more information on Waves’ future intentions, following up with a Q&A session on a post he made on the project’s Telegram group.

Besides talking about messaging, he detailed how the project is serious about AI and gaming. For the latter, Waves is working towards creating possibilities for game publishers and developers to use game agents that will integrate crypto-based rewards easily and more. He also stated that they are in talks with big companies.

Even more interestingly, the trading department at Waves is now revving up, looking at AI for trading prediction, which could be integrated with WAVES DEX.

Final Thoughts

The methodical approach to development and building partnerships speaks volumes about the intelligence with which Waves is building their platform. They are thought of well by the community, make consistent commits on Github, and are open to discussions.

What’s already a good project is shaping up to be an even better one with the arrival of atomic swaps and Turing-complete smart contracts, with the former making Waves an even better DEX and the latter increasing its use case possibilities.

Apart from the fact that they are building the aforementioned features, the two factors that could really spur the project forward are their partnerships and the launch of those tokens on the platform. That may give them a level of exposure that simple features may not achieve independently.

Keep your eyes on Waves to see how the project further progresses. To keep up to date, visit the Waves blog or follow them on Twitter.

About Abhimanyu Krishnan

Abhimanyu is an engineer on paper but a writer by living. To him, the most celebratory aspect of blockchain technology is its democratic nature. While he’s hodling, he can be found reading a good book or making the local dogs howl with the sound of his guitar playing.